Vegetarian Choice
Learning about and understanding how a vegetarian diet works and why it provides many health benefits is an important first step to accepting and embracing this lifestyle choice.
Making the decision to no longer eat meat is not something anyone should take lightly until they have first investigated the dietary impacts and are aware of what complimentary changes they should make to maintain a healthy nutritional intake.
This site is here to help inform about these changes and what it means to become a vegetarian from the perspective of an ordinary person without all the confusing technical and medical jargon that can be off-putting to many who wish to embark upon this lifestyle journey.
Vegetarian Diet
Being a vegetarian means eating a meat-free or vegetarian diet.
The basic concept is to eat healthfully without the need for killing any animal for its meat.
As such, it is as much of a humanitarian issue as it is a personal health choice.
The vegetarian diet does not need to be as strict as a completely vegan diet where all animal products are eliminated.
Vegetarianism allows the inclusion of eggs and dairy products in the diet.
This is helpful for providing protein and other nutrients that can be difficult (although not impossible) to obtain without them.
Vegetarian Diet Weight Loss
For using a vegetarian diet to lose weight, there are a number of options available to you.
You could go the traditional dieting route of buying your own fresh food, preparing and cooking your own meals. This is more time consuming, but far more beneficial in health terms, because you control what goes into your meals totally.
Another option is to take advantage of any one of the commercial diet programs that specialize on a vegetarian diet plan to achieve weight loss without compromising on time. You can read about arguably one of the most popular of these here:
http://www.sakmeatlessday.com/html/nutrisystem-vegetarian.htm
There are other options as well, but I prefer to focus on the healthiest strategy, which is to take the traditional food sourcing and preparation path of doing it all myself (more on that later).
Vegetarian Lifestyle
Once you have made your decision and adopted a vegetarian lifestyle, you will begin to notice some changes about how you feel and even how you look.
The best way I know of to put this is to share my own experiences upon making this life change for myself.
The physical and mental changes that occur upon becoming vegetarian is a gradual process. Personally, over time, I began to feel what I can only describe as "cleaner" inside.
This may be a subjective description and may be different for different people, but some of my friends that also made the change to vegetarianism described a similar feeling some weeks into being meat-free.
Another change I noticed was a feeling of lightness and an increase in energy. It coincided with a reduction in body weight of a few pounds.
The changes occurred over the first few weeks until I settled down into the way of life and they became the new normality for me.
Another rather surprising change was in my weekly shopping bill, which had become a lot less for not spending any of it on meat and meat products!
Vegetarian Food
I'm sure you're interested to see what foods I use in my own meals, so here is my share on what I eat and how I prepare it.
As I mentioned above, being vegetarian doesn't mean being as strict with food as being vegan, so I do allow eggs and some dairy into my life. My main philosophy is to not cause an animal to die to provide me with food.
A chicken can lay eggs without being killed, so eggs are fine. The same goes for products derived from milk.
On the dairy side of things, I am a little more strict with myself and avoid most of what comes from dairy cows. As most dairy is pasteurized, the important enzyme, lactase, which is needed to enable us humans to digest/metabolize lactose is destroyed in the pasteurization process.
Hence most adults are lactose intolerant, which leads to a lot of digestive issues that I'm not happy to experience. I quit drinking milk many years ago, stopped using butter and limited my consumption of cheese for this reason.
A more digestible alternative for me is goat's cheese, which I do allow myself a little of here and there. A local organic farm supplies this (along with my eggs and veggies), although I appreciate it is not so easy to obtain everywhere.
Goat's cheese sold in grocery stores tends to be non-organic, pasteurized and factory produced, which I don't much like.
Hint: I go for organic produce where possible (more on that in a separate article).
I grow some of my own vegetables in my backyard and buy what I don't grow from a local organic farm store. This is to limit consuming foods loaded with the many toxic chemicals that mainstream farms spray on their crops.
The eggs and goats cheese comes from chickens and goats that eat what they're supposed to eat as they roam around the open fields. Mainstream farms feed their livestock on grain-based "feed" that is not right for the animals and leads to more sickness and tainted produce.
Organic eggs from chickens that roam free and eat insects and seeds they peck at in the dirt are way healthier!
I eat some veggies raw, others I cook, depending on my tastes and which are better in their raw state from both a health aspect and a taste aspect. I'll expand on this in a separate article.
Summing Up
Being vegetarian is a way of life for me that I find enjoyable and healthy.
I don't need to feel bad about eating anything that comes from slaughtered animals that most likely lived a miserable and short life in horrific conditions. That's a conscience-burden I'll leave to those that wish to continue their habitual, carnivorous way of eating.
I don't miss eating meat at all and friends in the same situation voice the same feeling.
I am well aware of the environmental benefit of not eating meat and how much better our world would be if humanity would also make this change. However, I am also aware that such a thing may not happen in my lifetime and just accept it and get on with my own life, while allowing others to get on with theirs without judgement or interference.